January 2012

Weird College News of the Week
Dartmouth Installs Pianos at Bus Stops, Vassar Accepts the Wrong Students, and other . . .
Weird College News of the Week
In case you didn’t realize it, the world of education is filled with events that could be called weird, dumb, and just plain bizarre.
Here’s a roundup of curious college news from the last week alone . . .
Vassar College made a mistake on its website and informed 76 students that they had been admitted via the college’s early acceptance program. Then it had to backtrack and tell them that they hadn’t.
The Princeton Review recently published – for reasons we can’t quite understand - a list of the 10 American colleges that are most friendly to smoking pot. Color ...

President Obama to Colleges: Keep Costs Down, and You’ll Get More Federal Dollars
"We are putting colleges on notice. You can’t assume that you'll just jack up tuition every single year."
- President Obama speaking at the University of Michigan, January 27, 2012
We usually steer clear of politics on this blog. But an idea expressed by president Obama in a speech at the University of Michigan on January 27 makes so much sense, we have to stand up and take notice. If the same idea had come from a Republican president we would write about it too. (Heck, if Donald Duck had come up with the idea, we would probably cheer too.)
So what’s the plan? To quote from the president . . .
“If you can't stop tuition from go ...

Look if You Dare! Huge Cache of College Trivia Discovered
We just found the huge, immense and overwhelming database of college trivia that Inside College has made available on its website.
Don’t even look at it unless you are ready to spend hours clicking around and discovering all kinds of amazing facts about American colleges and the famous people who went to them.
Here are just a few of the trivial facts that you can discover . . .
Students who attend Bard College call themselves “Bardies,” students who attend Duke call themselves “Dukies,” and students who attend Emory call themselves “Emeroids.” (You better know this stuff before you apply.)
The University of Chicago, Cornell, and Kenyon College are Ameri ...

Samantha Garvey, Homeless Teen, Wins $50,000 Intel Scholarship (Now How about Everybody Else?)
There is no question that America really likes empowering “rags to riches” stories about deserving students who suddenly get big breaks.
One recent story to hit the news – big time – concerns a smart young woman named Samantha Garvey. An Associated Press story reports the story of this deserving young woman, who won a prestigious Intel $50,000 science scholarship thanks to some innovative research she did about the effects that a non-native species, the Asian short crab, is having on mussel populations on Long Island, New York. What makes her story unusual is that she and her family, due to financial difficulties, had been forced to mo ...

Getting into College Made Easy: Handling College Alumni Interviews
If you’re applying to a college that offers you a chance to have an interview with an alumnus or alumna who attended the school, should you schedule one?
The answer is, yes. Alumni interviews can only improve your chances of getting into a college. They represent an opportunity that is all upside, with no downside.
Do be aware, however, that different colleges place different levels of importance on these interviews. Some colleges apparently value them a great deal, others do not. For example, I was part of a group of alumni who did interviews for the Ivy League institution where I got my master’s degree, and I can report with some certainty that the post-interv ...